Happy New Year! As I always say, this is a great time of year to reflect. We achieved a lot to be proud of in 2010. As well as our regular software releases, and a user base that grew by another 25% over the year, some of the highlights included: - Queensberry press book integration – our new classroom movie series – and of course our popular weekly webinars... We're not quite so proud of these out-takes from a filming session Nigel and I did for our website home page. But Ian found them pretty funny and made them into a short video. Maybe you'll have a laugh at/with me too. You can click To View More >>

Follow the links for "the story so far" in our series on the recession... Yes, times will be tough for a while but you shouldn't assume the sky is falling. It makes no sense to sacrifice your business and market reputation to survive the short term challenge. Instead you may need to pull your horns in and find ways to prosper while others decline. A good place to start is by analysing your budget and business model, and we have a spreadsheet to help with that. Most people react to the threat of declining sales by saying, "I've gotta cut my costs". Everyone needs to work out their own figures, To View More >>

Well in excess of 2000 aftershocks later, the region I live in still has no idea when the shaking will stop. [caption id="attachment_9611" align="alignnone" width="333" caption="I arrived at the bride's mum's house, and they had a big crack in their drive that went ..."][/caption] On September 4, 2010, Christchurch (New Zealand) was rudely awoken (4:35am) by a rather large Earthquake (magnitude 7.1 on the Richter scale).The energy released in that one shake is still way in excess of the sum of the energy released by all of  the aftershocks, even though many have been over 4 and several To View More >>

Kayla and I married last December out in the notoriously wet Waitakere Ranges, at a venue called Cassels. You can read more about the day here. The day before, bad weather was forecast. Not good. So I met up with our photographer Johannes van Kan to discuss our options. Options governed by what the weather would decide to do, and that would ultimately determine the format of album we went with. If it rained we'd focus on portrait shots around the venue, more suited to a smaller, squarer album. Sunny, and we'd head to the beach and get some nice panoramic shots and go with a wide format album To View More >>

My recent email suggested that if you can't name five things that differentiate you there is probably only one - price! Not a good look. Among the responses was this one: I'm so sick of working harder and not smarter with the middle to lower end. I want to start all over again and aim at the high end of the market with the best products and service. I have never done an album before. I made the decision to specialise in babies, children and family portraiture. I can visualise beautiful portrait albums sitting on my coffee table in the studio, but I don’t know where to start. Albums are not the To View More >>